Yes Lab-Grown Diamonds are Real!

Lab-grown diamonds offer the ideal alternative to unethically mined diamonds, not only are they cheaper but they are also more environmentally friendly.

How do scientists make lab-grown diamonds?

The process for making artificial diamonds that are an exact match for natural ones that have been pulled out from the ground involves using so-called carbon seeds, or small fragments of diamond, into a microwave. There, it will interact with a varying amount of a certain carbon-heavy gas, and the usual choice for it is methane.

The mixture of gas gets heated in the microwave to very high temperatures to produce a plasma ball. Once it materializes, the gas breaks down, and then the carbon atoms will start to crystallize and then accumulate on the diamond seed, which ends up causing it to grow.

On average, this process usually takes up to 10 long weeks before it can produce a marketable diamond. But it is said that the success rate is so high that by the time the marketable diamonds are created, it becomes practically impossible to tell them apart from natural diamonds that were taken from riverbeds or mines.